Yumbles, the marketplace for foodies and food suppliers to meet is going from strength to strength. They’re seeing traffic and sales increase month-on-month, and lots of exciting new sellers joining every week.
It’s been six months since we first wrote about Yumbles and there’s been impressive growth with sales up 1600% year on year, with 25% growth on average month on month since Oct (excluding seasonality). Sellers are adopting the site too with numbers up by 400% year on year.
There are lots of things Yumbles are doing to fuel this growth… not least of which is stocking the mouth watering goodies the talented artisans who produce the delicious foods on offer.
What’s unique about Yumbles
Where else could you find products such as home grown Cotswold Gold – extra virgin cold pressed rape seed oil using home grown seed on Charlie Beldam ’s family farm in Gloucestershire? Charlie is just one of the unique producers offering foods that you just can’t get on the supermarket shelves.
If you’re a foodie who loves discovering great food then you’ll really love Yumbles!
Yumbles Makers Meet-Up
The first-ever Yumbles Makers Meet-Up took place earlier this month, which was a chance for Yumbles sellers to come and pick up practical advice on how to get the most out of listing on Yumbles – as well as more general updates and networking with fellow foodie sellers. This was a great event and really well received, and Yumbles intend to run many more in the future! They have also been running a Seller Boot Camp with weekly tips and advice.
Yumbles also have a marketing calendar and they’re pretty proactive in inviting sellers to participate in promotions and photo shoots throughout the year.
Better than subscribing to a news letter
Forget about getting a regular email newsletter, in March this year Yumbles launched something much better – food subscriptions both for sellers (who can now create their own subscriptions and offer food and gifts on a recurring basis), and their own Yumbles Food Explorers Club. The Yumbles Food Explorers Club gives customers free delivery on hundreds of products and exclusive weekly deals, in return for a low monthly fee.
It’s great to see a marketplace coming up with innovative ideas to drive sales on a regular basis for their sellers. When a buyer makes a purchase they’re offered the opportunity to subscribe ensuring they’ll come back for future purchases.
New Features on Yumbles
Yumbles have added the ability for customers to ask questions before placing an order (which is particularly useful for sellers offering more involved or bespoke products, such as wedding favours), and tags. Sellers can now add tags to their products to make them easier to find across the marketplace.
This might sound like pretty basic stuff, but don’t forget that Yumbles is a relatively new marketplace and doesn’t yet have all the features you might expect on established platforms.
New categories
Fresh meat and British charcuterie are the latest categories to be added to Yumbles, both ofwhich have got off to a strong start. Yumbles are already lining up more new sellers in these categories due to launch over the coming weeks and months, as well as some other new sections.
….and they sell sweets
Speaking to Yumbles and also to some of the sellers on their marketplace, it’s an exciting place to be at the moment. It’s still a young marketplace but it’s growing fast and sellers are seeing ever increasing numbers of orders. Plus of course they also sell sweets!
4 Responses
My partner is an outstanding savouries and cakes cook who sells really well in local markets. Obviously Yumbles should have been of interest to her when your earlier news brought our attention to them. Yet she has been reluctant to take the plunge and enlist in one of their seller accounts. Why?
From the outset not only the “apply and we’ll see if you’re suitable” business approach but also the inability to get a reasonable answer to a reasonable question : what are Yumbles fees, especially as they pay the seller and not the buyer, hasn’t left her wanting to rush in with naivety. One of the few threads found on the web for a question about Yumbles fees contains the following words from their Co-founder :
“If you wouldn’t mind, I would prefer not to answer here simply because this information will probably get out of date as and when we do change our fees and will end up being misleading to others that might google this question.
We’re transparent about our fees and we’re in the process of publishing this information publicly on Yumbles.com in the next couple of weeks.”
That was months ago and nothing on their site, not even much in “7. Payment methods” in their T&C.
Could anyone imagine anybody signing up to sell on eBay if they got a similar answer?
Then they need pictures of your produce to help them make up THEIR mind if you’re any good, except they only want URL’s to these if on the web and not as an attachment? If you can do your own web-site or manage Facebook or the others then you’re already well on the way to selling on the web with only PayPal fees to contend with.
Sometime trying to make oneself appear so superior to the rest of the marketplace isn’t the best business approach.
I think it’s good they are setting high standards and are keeping the barrier to entry high, low morale, illegal, policy breaching sellers are rife on eBay and also amazon.
Sorry but if u are not confident in ur wares or ur business practice then get out the kitchen roger